Kazakh language

Speakers of Kazakh are spread over a vast territory from the Tian Shan to the western shore of the Caspian Sea. Kazakh is the official state language of Kazakhstan, with nearly 10 million speakers (based on information from the CIA World Factbook on population and proportion of Kazakh speakers). In China, nearly two million ethnic Kazakhs and Kazakh speakers reside in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang. ==History==

The Kipchak branch of Turkic languages, of which Kazakh is a member, was mainly solidified during the reign of the Golden Horde. The modern Kazakh language is said to have formed around 1465 AD during the formation of the Kazakh Khanate. Modern Kazakh is likely a descendant of both Chagatay Turkic as spoken by the Timurids, and Kipchak Turkic as spoken in the Golden Horde. Kazakh uses a high volume of loanwords from Persian and Arabic due to the frequent historical interactions between Kazakhs and Iranian ethnic groups to the south. Additionally, Persian was a lingua franca in the Kazakh Khanate, which allowed Kazakhs to mix Persian words into their own spoken and written vernacular. Meanwhile, Arabic was used by Kazakhs in mosques and mausoleums, serving as a language exclusively for religious contexts, similar to how Latin served as a liturgical language in the Western European cultural sphere. The Kazakhs used the Arabic script to write their language until approximately 1929. In the early 1900s, Kazakh activist Akhmet Baitursynuly reformed the Kazakh-Arabic alphabet, but his work was largely overshadowed by the Soviet presence in Central Asia. At that point, the new Soviet regime forced the Kazakhs to use a Latin script, and then a Cyrillic script in the 1940s. Today, Kazakhs use the Cyrillic and Latin scripts to write their language, although a presidential decree from 2017 ordered the transition from Cyrillic to Latin by 2031. Although not an endangered language, in 2024, Kazakh has been described as being placed in a somewhat vulnerable position by the Kazakhstani Minister of Science and Higher Education Sayasat Nurbek, within a category where the number of speakers is not increasing as rapidly as anticipated. == Phonology and orthography ==

Kazakh exhibits tongue-root vowel harmony, with some words of recent foreign origin (e.g., Russian, Persian, Arabic) as exceptions. There is also a system of rounding harmony which resembles that of Kyrgyz, but which does not apply as strongly and is not reflected in the orthography. This system only applies to the mid vowels (and not ), and happens in the next syllables. Thus, 'star', 'today', and 'big' are actually pronounced as , , and , respectively. Consonants The following chart depicts the consonant inventory of standard Kazakh; many of the sounds, however, are allophones of other sounds or appear only in recent loanwords. The 18 consonant phonemes listed by Vajda are without parentheses—since these are phonemes, their listed place and manner of articulation are very general, and will vary from what is shown. ( rarely appears in normal speech.) Kazakh has 19 native consonant phonemes; these are the stops , fricatives , nasals , liquids , and two glides . The sounds are found only in loanwords. is heard as an alveolo-palatal affricate in the Kazakh dialects of Uzbekistan and China. The sounds and may be analyzed as allophones of and in words with back vowels, but exceptions occur in loanwords. • Voiced obstruents syllable-finally become devoiced, It can be found in some native words, however. According to Vajda, the front/back quality of vowels is actually one of neutral versus retracted tongue root. Vowel harmony Kazakh exhibits tongue-root vowel harmony (also called soft-hard harmony), and arguably weakened rounding harmony which is implied in the first syllable of the word. All vowels after the first rounded syllable are the subject to this harmony with the exception of , and in the following syllables, e.g., , . Notably, urban Kazakh speakers tend to violate rounding harmony, as well as pronouncing Russian borrowings against the rules. • When counting objects, numbers are stressed in the first syllable, but stressed in the last syllable in collective numbers suffixed by (, from , ): :, , , , , , , ... : • Definite and negative pronouns are stressed in the first syllable: : : • Individual onomatopoeic words and interjections are stressed on the first syllable • Certain suffixes do not take stress, including: • the predicate suffixes -mın/-myn, -sıñ/-syñ, -mız/-myz (e.g., baqyttymyz 'we are happy', balasyñ 'you're a child') • the suffixes -dei/-dai, -tei/-tai (e.g., börıdei 'like a wolf') • the optative suffix -iın/-iyn (e.g., jazaiyn 'let's write') • the negative suffixes -me/-ma, -be/-ba, -pe/-pa (e.g., jylama 'don't cry', qoryqpa 'fear not') • particles and postpositions -şı/-şy (e.g., qaraşy! 'look!'), ğoi, etc. Orthography Nowadays, Kazakh is mostly written in the Cyrillic script, with an Arabic-based alphabet being used by Kazakh speakers in China. On 26 October 2017, via Presidential Decree 569, Kazakhstan announced it would adopt the Latin script by 2025. However, this transition has been delayed. Since the Cyrillic alphabet was originally designed for Slavic languages, it had to be modified to better fit the sounds of Turkic languages like Kazakh. Several new letters were added and some existing ones modified: ә, ғ, қ, ң, ө, ұ, ү, һ, і. The Cyrillic letter у after a consonant represents a combination of sounds , , ы , with glide , e.g., , , , . The Cyrillic letter ю undergoes the same process but with at the beginning. The letter и represents a combination of sounds (in front-vowel contexts) or (in back vowel contexts) with glide , e.g., , . In Russian loanwords, particularly in educated speech, it is often realized as (when stressed) or (when unstressed), e.g., . The letter я represents either or depending on vowel harmony. The letter щ represents , e.g. . Meanwhile, the letters в, ё, ф, х, һ, ц, ч, ъ, ь, э are only used in loanwords—mostly those of Russian origin, but sometimes of Persian and Arabic origin. They are often substituted in spoken Kazakh. The table below compares the various scripts. } == Grammar ==

Kazakh is generally verb-final, though various permutations on SOV (subject–object–verb) word order can be used, for example, due to topicalization. Inflectional and derivational morphology, both verbal and nominal, in Kazakh, exists almost exclusively in the form of agglutinative suffixes. Kazakh is a nominative-accusative, head-final, left-branching, dependent-marking language. Nouns Kazakh has no noun class or gender system. Nouns are declined for number (singular or plural) and one of seven cases: • Nominative • Accusative • Genitive • Dative • Locative • Ablative • Instrumental Verbs Kazakh may express different combinations of tense, aspect and mood through the use of various verbal morphology or through a system of auxiliary verbs, many of which might better be considered light verbs. The present tense is a prime example of this; progressive tense in Kazakh is formed with one of four possible auxiliaries. These auxiliaries , , and , encode various shades of meaning of how the action is carried out and also interact with the lexical semantics of the root verb: telic and non-telic actions, semelfactives, durative and non-durative, punctual, etc. There are selectional restrictions on auxiliaries: motion verbs, such as and may not combine with . Any verb, however, can combine with to get a progressive tense meaning. While it is possible to think that different categories of aspect govern the choice of auxiliary, it is not so straightforward in Kazakh. Auxiliaries are internally sensitive to the lexical semantics of predicates, for example, verbs describing motion: In addition to the complexities of the progressive tense, there are many auxiliary-converb pairs that encode a range of aspectual, modal, volitional, evidential and action- modificational meanings. For example, the pattern verb + , with the auxiliary verb , indicates that the subject of the verb attempted or tried to do something (compare the Japanese construction). == Annotated text with gloss ==

From the first stanza and refrain of "Menıñ Qazaqstanym" ("My Kazakhstan"), the national anthem of Kazakhstan: ==See also==